


Ivka of Malice

by Lily_and_Lori



Category: Original Work
Genre: Birds, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Post-Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-05
Updated: 2019-06-05
Packaged: 2020-04-08 13:12:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19107790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lily_and_Lori/pseuds/Lily_and_Lori
Summary: Ivka meets a new friend





	Ivka of Malice

**Author's Note:**

> To be honest, this is a test. More to be posted

Ivka of Malice

 

The soft fluttering of wings and a weight on my shoulder stirred me from my daytime stupor. Sunlight gleamed overhead through the branches of the canopy illuminating the gorgeous autumn leaves both on the trees and decorating the forest floor concealing the cracked concrete beneath. The sleek, metal bench, overgrown with weeds and creaking with rust, which I was sitting on the end of had become infested with little black birds with a large one sitting on my shoulders digging it’s talons into my faded white coat. They didn’t seem skittish and stood firm as I sat myself back up. I looked at they inspected me twitching their head to look at me with deep unblinking eyes, one milky blue and the other an unforgiving black. As they spoke, crackling static escaped their beak along with a flat rustic voice “Lo, demon! Or devil! Or sprite! Whatever manner of phantasm thou may be! Be fearful for thou shall face a reckoning swift and holy!”

I raised my hand and scratched the bird’s beak. “Such a sweet little raven, you don’t sound too good though. Are you sick little bird?” They seemed complacent with being touched, continuing to watch me calmly.

They spoke again the crackling shook the air and buzzed inside of my head. “Lo beast of nightmare! Thou and thy kinsfolk hast no place here nor Hell!”

“Such a talkative little bird!” Uncurling my legs, I pressed hard on the bench’s armrest as I stood up. I wobbled in place for moment finding balance on my feet again. The raven steadied itself and started looking around. I noticed the little birds were closer than before. “I don’t know what to do with you.” I scratched it’s little feathery head, which didn’t seem to notice. “Maybe you want to come home with me? I could use the company!”

“I tread not with the likes of you! Thou shall leave and I shall stay!” The voice had some music behind it, a tinny, haunting tune played on piano.

“Are you sure? I’ve got food for you!” I chimed in a happy singsong voice. As I began walking crisp fallen leaves of aged browns crunched beneath my footfalls. I tread along the concrete sidewalks, cracked to rubble by weeds and time, out of ancient habits that had grown wrinkles in my brain. Rotten, ruined cars of sleek and slender design lined the sides of the street, striped of all things both useful and portable

“Tempt me not, I have no trust in the feast thou offers!” Voice still as the grave, yet they still clung on. The other smaller birds were making little flying hops to keep up with us.

I continued my walk besides the dirtied glass towers which struck far into the sky above the canopy, threatening in their presence above. The sunlight that splayed upon the gleaming mass still dimly powered the lights inside and I would walk by the entrance the these great monolith of an older age to see the epileptic flickers of bright bitter bulbs in deeply darkened and abandoned atriums. The little raven continued to accompany me. “Complain all you want little birdie you’re pretty content to sit on my shoulder and follow me.”

“I am your salvation devil! As if your personal angel to dredge you from the bowels of Hell!” The bird seemed different somehow, but I couldn’t place it.

“Already got one my dear omen, she’s far scarier than a pretty little bird like you!” I chimed, dark thoughts and phantasms flickering about. “Hopefully you won’t have to meet her.” Calmly scratching the raven’s fluffy feather beard. They flapped their wings a bit and made loud distorted caws in various directions for a while. We walked mostly in silence with just the crunch of leaves underfoot and the distant echoing calls of forest creatures. I came to the intersection of a street a single carcass of a bus lay in the center I saw the broad side of it which displayed a mural with a moral broken and interrupted with encroaching rust. The trees had yet to cover the middle and so a pillar of sunlight illuminated the bright primary colors of the bus’s paint. Shimmering, shattered, scattered, stuttering, spectacles-stills of signs, stipulations, and suggestions hung in the air their meaning and purpose long lost to the wages of time. I still understood them, and with long standing habits still obeyed them halting just before the road watching small breezes perturb the leaves. When the signs changed I began walking, wandering, wayward towards the bus, my steps crossing each other. At one of the buses doors I pulled apart the rotten rubber and dirtied, distorted plexiglass and walked up the steel steps. The little birds had formed a flock outside the bus, still so silent.

The interior seats hadn’t been harvested, the forgotten foam and fabric eaten away by moths and mules too unappetizing to the detrivores that picked apart all the other vehicles. I walked through the rows of seats brushing my hand against the fabric carefully caressing the textures, trying to dredge the fathoms of my memory vacant flickers were all that was left. I sat down in an eaten up seat and the raven settled next to me. “Why even bother trying to save me?”

“You deserve to be saved, like all those absents of gods or place!” The raven gained a third voice, it was getting harder to distinguish them from the noise he spewed.

“Oh I’m hardly abandoned by the gods, I would much prefer it if I was.” My eyes darted to something on the window and back to the raven. “I think the pleasantness is going to end soon.”

“We should have left! This is not a place for you!” The voice garbled to nonsense, little birds had swarmed the inside of the bus.

“I hate this, I really do, but you need to know who you’re trying to save.” Those dark feelings, the deep emptiness came rising, radiating from my chest.

The raven and his little birds were gone, as was much of the day. This was not the same bus my heart fluttered as my eyes drank in the new environment. The bus I now sat in was shrouded in shadows and sobering amber light. My body was badly aching, my arms and clothes were blemished with blackened bruises, burns, and blots. Each one seared horrifically, clearly things did not go well. My legs were soaked and my boots sank in shallow, but disturbingly dark water. The windows crawling with creepers of a clear, crisp, cheerful, color. The air was heavy with listless, languid, air plagued with musty molds and the strong scent of salt. The gentle lapping of waves and vibrant calls of sea birds hounded the air. I stood up, white flashes invading the corners of my eyes, I stumbled a moment before everything became sharp and clear. After collecting myself I began trudging through the rows. My footfalls splashed and sent shocks up my legs igniting a hundred points across my skin. I whined, as every step sending surreptitious shocks spreading further up my legs. My cries hailed among the sickly sounds suspended in the air. down, the seat creaked and complained beneath me, and the raven fluttered onto the seat in front of me. “Between the spaces, we should not rest here!” The bird’s voice was disturbing, distorted and garbled, layered with another.

“No, we should talk. Let’s start with names, I’m Ivka.”

“My name is written upon my face, if you cannot read it, it is Salt!” The name crackled harshly with a dozen voices speaking it at once. “We cannot stay!”

“’Salt’? A powerful name, never expected such a sweet little bird to carry it.” I waited for awhile, I looked longingly out the window. The flock of little birds had tripled from what I could see, no doubt more were on the roof. I turned back to the raven, as darkness grew within

I turned to leave the bus, the doors torn apart half sunk in the sea and a heinous and hideous humour hung upon the scraps. Stepping slowly down the steps the sea brought the stinging cold that nothing to soothe my burns. I kept walking, wading through the waking waves until I reached the former sidewalk. Upon the gleaming glaring glass of garish gains, stories told in abstract colors sprang to life. Whimsical, wayward, whispers of colliding colors and crashing crystals, a cacophony covering me in dreary dust of dead denizens. My eyes clamped shut and the darkness brought silence, only the freezing waves remained. Along the half forgotten roads I walked blind to all but memory. The air carried my thoughts in the sea breeze whisking them away before they grew roots in my brain. The ocean slowly seeped away step by step. Once I reached dry land I opened my eyes again. The canopy was lax here burning with the dimming of dusk.

A young girl sat upon a car’s carcass swinging her legs in and out of it’s gaping wounds. She was dressed in the scraps of a dead world. Outfits and artifacts with no more meaning than the trash adorned her. She was new and looked at me oddly. She saw someone seeking solitude in crowded, cacophonous crevasse. “Who are you?” The girl asked tilting her head.

“Tricky question!” I continue my walk. “The answer keeps changing on me.”

“So, what’s the answer right now?” She asked not missing a beat.

“Ivka… I think.” I took a breath of the dusk air. “It’s late, the homestead calls.”

“Can I come with, the city’s creepy at night.” She jumped down from the car and meandered to my side. “I’m Yana by the way!”

“I’m creepier, believe me.” We walked way by way through the cracked concrete and concordant coarse grasses.

“I’ll take my chances, there are scarier things than you out here.” Yana’s eyes soaked in the world around her, but still blind she followed. We walked in silence for street after street. The city woke as the sun slipped beneath the sky, the cacophonous calls of carapaced creatures creeping unseen uncertain unsupervised, just like all of us.

“Don’t you have somewhere else to stay? Can’t exactly rely on wandering wild woman to take you in every day.”

“Oh you’d be surprised!” She clung to herself, grasping to whatever fading warmth was left within her. “Are we getting close?”

“Yeah, I can still taste the dust.” asked anxiously.

Excited she spouted. “What are _you_ so nervous about?”

“Home, it’s ridden with memory.” We arrived at the torn tower, a single wrecked ruin among the rust and rubble. Sharp and dangerous dagger jutting from dust and debris. A path, long made, was our way through.

“Oh! You live here? I suppose that’s pretty cool.” She gazed upward to the perilous, pernicious, petulant, peaks peering, piercingly across the city. “Oh! Do you know what happened to it?”

“Malice…She lives with us, up there.” I pushed open the empty frames of the glass doors ducking inside. the inside lobby was unlit and the fading light outside made little for us to see.

Crossing the darkness Yana asked. “Who’s Malice? How do you know her?”

“Even for us, it’s complicated.” I pressed on the wall and a tiny yellow yearning bulb lit up, shining in the pitch darkness.

“But who is she?” She insisted as a solemn solitaryding rang raucous throughout the torchless tower and the wall opened to a burning bright room inlaid with gold, and the ghosts of alien groves. Pale pink patterns and patchespockmarked the perforated panels, pitted and polluted with past poisons. I stepped inside and with some hesitation she followed.

“An angel… My own personal _guardian_.”I said as the doors shuddered close and our trip went skyward. The world began moving, spinning, twisting, dancing.

She jittered lively her trinkets jingling. “Are you kidding me? How do you know an angel? That’s fucking insane!”

“It is-” The doors opened again. “- _She_ is.” Beyond the doors was the withering waking dream I lived in. “ _We_ are.” It was once a hall that lead to over two dozen homes, mine among them. An age ago there were two and two others, I lost both and gained a third and everything else was lost. In the space that was once a hall was a skyward schism- consuming whatever rooms and roofs once lived there- yawning above growing ever wider as it ascended to the dusken dark. Far on the other side of rift the rest of the rooms survived.

“A crazy angel sounds terrifying… Is that what happened? To the city?” She asked as I strode out of the elevator. The edges of the room trailing through my vision.

“No, something stranger, stranger.” I stood at the threshold keeping her on the other side. “I… I have to be clear here.” I held the doors from shutting. “If you are scared now… go back, because it’s only going to get scarier and more dangerous.” My sight was slipping, and the floor was shifting underfoot.

Yana looked at me, she seemed different but I couldn’t place it. Crossing her arms she said. “I feel pretty safe around you. You’re cool, definitely crazy, but cool. Plus it’s not like you lured me here.”

I found myself smiling and let Yana walk by. The doors slid shut and I said. “I hope this doesn’t sound too creepy, but it’s best you don’t go in every room.” Although I felt urged to say that, I wasn’t sure where I was right now

“Nah, I get it, private rooms.” Yana looked with curious awe at the sky above, I was simply overcome with confusion.

I crossed the crumbled carpeting, crusted with crumbs of concrete, to the solace of the sole supplicating light. Under which Yana’s hair, flecked with liquid golden shines, showed it’s frays and roughness. A sadness haunted her as she looked to the first door, left untethered to the storms of my life. “Are you… okay?”

Her eyes flickered. “Oh, it’s nothing...”

“The marked doors are… private, but if you’re extra cautious- and don’t mind some dust- you can just stick to this one.” The knob had been bent and a hole replaced the deadbolt. Through the aged rough edges of the absence a yearningdarkness awaited. I pushed the door open, the light free to frolic like fire across the furnishings. The smell beneath stale air, tinged with rot, was far too nostalgic. If I stayed too long I’d be poisoned by the reverie.

“Oh good to know!” She brushed the inside wall, warm wall lights welled with energy welcoming the weary and well traveled. The scene lay as it had for decades collecting only the slow decay of age and an ever increasing collection of holes and tarnishes. I had never liked this place, or at least I could never remember a single passing positive thought. It had only gotten worse with time, but our disdain made disinterest and the space had been spared our spurious sparring. Nausea needled my gut as Yana spoke. “Looks abandoned, but you cleaned it right. I’m not gonna find like… bones or anything right?”

“No they were… away at the time.” The words slithered between my teeth.

“Oh, good.” She sighed. Plopping herself down on the sagging sofa inside. “I can almost imagine what this place was like before. I bet it felt safe.”

I wandered inside embracing the descent into memory. “It did, well I don’t know about here specifically, but in general the city was safe.” I sat carefully down beside the small girl “It’s a testament to the tact of the time, that these things still stand, and function.”

“You were there? That long ago? How old are you?” She leaned against me, with whiffs of fallen autumn leaves following suite.

“One hundred and eighteen. That used to be young by the way.” I wrapped an arm around her without realizing why. “How young are you?”

“About fifteen!” She pulled up her sleeve revealing a watch of black steel whose strap was frayed and patched together. It’s glass face was cracked and dusty, but clear enough to see that it had kept perfect time to the second. “I’ve kept track!”

I smiled dizzy with dead dreams and dying doldrums of memory. So many lost years ago, I was in a familiar place with someone I loved. I kept the name away from my thoughts, for fear of the tears it would bring. “It’s very important you keep track of that stuff!” As the poison thoughts slipped further into the forefront, I smiled warmly. “Do you require anything?”

“I don’t want to ask for too much...” She relaxed, letting her sleeve slowly slide down her arm. “Don’t want to be a burden.”

“How can you be a burden?We’re happy to do whatever we can for you!” Swimming among the memories keeping the details just below the surface, I felt the world grow fuzzy and uncertain.

Her smile flickered. “Oh thank you! But really, nothing right now. Maybe in the morning okay?” She leapt off the couch. “So, where’s the bedroom?”

“There’s two here.” Across the room lay a turn which held a selection of doors, I lead Yana there. “Either one, or the other each is as dusty as the last.”

She peered into the darkness of one then other, sadness creeping across her face once more as she contemplated the choice. She flashed her eyes at me and quickly muttered “Sorry, it’s just… It’s nothing.”

As she turned towards the door I had a hand on her shoulder. “Yana, are you sure you’re alright?”

She saw me with gleaming eyes, either into me or through me, but not at me. “Really, it’s nothing.” and she smiled. Before heading into one of the rooms.

 

 


End file.
